Alan O'Mara, Dick Clerkin and Ruaidhrí O'Connor joined Nathan Murphy on Off the Ball for this week's Saturday Panel.

With the GAA season slowly clicking into gear, talk turned to the workload inter-county players have to put in before the competitive season starts. 

"Well I was in Clones last Sunday, absolutely frozen, watching Monaghan and Donegal," former Monaghan footballer Dick Clerkin told Nathan, "And it was very entertaining, very high-scoring, 4-20 to 19 points and that's not something you'd associate with January football.

"Listen, I tweeted during the week with a lot of people calling for pre-season competitions to be scrapped - I don't feel that. Very simply, until there's a full restructure of the calender year - if you were to say 'Ok all these games, the O'Byrne Cup, the Walsh Cup, the FBD, the McKenna Cup - all scrapped in January' - all players would be doing is training. 

"And we're always talking about the games to training ratio is totally skewed and here we are, just because they mightn't be of interest in terms of the All-Ireland or not the big glamorous games that they have no value - I can categorically tell you as a player - they do have a value and people like to go and watch them, believe it or not - especially in Ulster. Maybe we're a bit mad up there, we just love our football.

"The McKenna Cup is always a very well supported competition. It's a decent standard and it is what it is - it's a pre-season tournament with the opportunity for managers to blood new players. People take out of it what they want. Nobody gets too annoyed about the results and that's what it is - it serves a purpose. 

"If you scrap it, all you're going to be doing is having another dead month that you're training and trudging through the wet ground as opposed to getting any competitive action."

The full discussion can be heard here: